Carret
Designing trust and transparency
Carret is a crypto investment platform that wanted to redesign their product to be the best solution for long term investors in India. Through proprietary trading strategies, they are able to offer extremely good returns to their users, often exceeding 17% APY.
We had the opportunity to collaborate with Carret to redesign the application from ground up, creating several unique features to help young investors from India resonate with the product.
The project was done through Clay Gorilla with my co-founder, Rithwik Jayasimha.
Product Development
Designing Carret's mobile application required an understanding of what was not working with the existing product for Indians. We talked to dozens of people who fit the target audience and some who didn't in order to gain a deeper understanding of what lends trust to a financial product, fears and apprehensions.
One of our most interesting discoveries was that excepting a few long time investors, the average investor had no mental model of crypto—all their transactions were based in INR and were constantly converting against the exchange rate to make sense of their holdings.
This also led to feelings of mistrust with an investment product like Carret, where the returns are based on returns on the crypto and not on the fiat value. To users, solving this made Carret feel much more transparent.
Working with Fiat Based Mental Models
We understood that users understand their investments through the lens of how much their INR holding value has appreciated or depreciated, we developed a slider for the investment screens that would allow users to visualize the size of their investment in real time.
The slider also had haptics and visual indicators for when the user tries to invest more than 100% of their crypto holdings. We did this since we wanted the process of investment to be frictionless and the shortfall would be made up later in the flow by having the user checkout and pay the delta.
Reducing Friction
All investment and portfolio applications by default, use a model where you must first 'deposit' money into the application before being allowed to invest it.
This is something many users find frustrating, and in crypto, where you're constantly playing with decimal values, it often results in much back and forth to ensure that your account is funded with enough money to invest.
Solving this issue proved to be a large engineering challenge as well, owing to the price fluctuations of crypto. We ultimately decided to trade a certain amount of user control and lock the price of the asset in on investment for a better experience.
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